Editors

Darren Dahl (Editor in Chief)Eileen FischerGita JoharVicki Morwitz

Impact factor3.1875 Year impact factor5.292

SSI: Business18 out of 120

About the Journal

Founded in 1974, the Journal of Consumer Research publishes scholarly research that describes and explains consumer behavior. Empirical, theoretical, and methodological articles spanning fields such as psychology, marketing, sociology, economics, communications, and anthropology are featured in this interdisciplinary journal. The primary thrust of JCR is academic, rather than managerial, with topics ranging from micro-level processes (such as brand choice) to more macro-level issues (such as the development of materialistic values).

Announcement

The Policy Board of the Journal of Consumer Research has voted to institute a new policy regarding current editors publishing in JCR. The policy precluded editors from submitting their work to JCR during their term as editors. Effective July 1, 2016, a new policy went into effect that allows current editors to submit their work to JCR for publication consideration. Read More >

Tutorials in Consumer Research

Tutorials in Consumer Research is a new initiative from JCR aimed at providing valuable how-to information for potential authors. Written by topic experts, these tutorials address conceptual and methodological aspects of research, offering guidance on how to execute top-notch research that can be both meaningful and impactful.

How do researchers studying the cultural aspects of consumption theorize change? We propose four analytical workbench modes of process theorization in combination with nine genres of process-oriented consumer research, each presenting a distinctive combination of assumptions about the nature of change in market and consumption systems and consumers’ role in these processes. Through this framework, we provide consumer researchers with a useful interpretive tool kit for deriving a process-oriented theorization from the unwieldy complexity of longitudinal data.

JCR Research Curations

JCR Research Curations are free virtual collections of JCR articles selected to highlight an important consumer research topic. Articles are curated by domain experts who identify links between JCR articles and assemble subject-related collections. The goal of these curated collections is to allow readers to explore a particular issue in depth and garner a deeper understanding of key consumer research topics.

The past two decades have seen an increase in attention directed toward understanding the role of interpersonal influence in the consumer context. A large body of this research has focused on one-to-one interactions wherein a single individual influences another individual (a salesperson, a fellow consumer, a spouse). However, another, smaller stream of interpersonal influence has focused on the impact of various sized "informal groups" on the individual (a many-to-one interaction). These informal groups are unique in the sense that they need not be formally defined, composed of known others, physically present, or even motivated to intentionally influence others. Instead, as reflected in the collection of articles selected for this curation, these groups are composed of various numbers of individuals whose actions, taken together, create a shared influence on a single consumer.

Headline Hitting Research

Pharmaceutical ads warn of every possible side effect. Don’t feel sorry for the drug companies, though. A new study finds that highlighting multiple risks can trick people into downplaying the overall risk. People who read that a hypertension drug may increase the chance of seizures had a lower opinion of the drug than if they read that the drug may increase the chance of seizures, congestion, fatigue, and so on, because they assumed the chance of seizures (the most worrisome side effect) was lower when other (minor) side effects were mentioned.

Market research has shown that consumers may be more likely to identify with the brands perceived as underdogs. Harvard Business School professor Anat Keinan has observed that effective underdog narratives inspire and give hope to customers. In a 2011 study she coauthored for the Journal of Consumer Research, Keinan found that brands that persevere in the face of relatively disadvantaged market positions tend to hold an outsized appeal.

In a 2014 study on minority entrepreneurs and consumers that was published in the Journal of Consumer Research, researchers conducted a study with black, Hispanic and white entrepreneurs that showed bank customer service reps were more likely to immediately engage white entrepreneurs with information about loan packages. Minority entrepreneurs, however, were more likely to first get prompted with questions about their financial background, and in some cases didn’t even make it as far as getting a business card.

When you go to a coffee shop and the barista writes your name on the cup, you're more likely to recycle it than if your name was misspelled or wasn't written on the cup at all. That's just one of several interesting recycling behaviors marketing researchers recently uncovered. It turns out we have fascinating biases that help determine what we recycle and what we just toss in the trash.

How can you avoid the pain of backing a loser? You could simply stay home on Election Day (the Canadian website’s nagging about voting be damned). Indeed, one body of research on decision making suggests that when you don’t care for your options, abstaining may be your best bet: Whether a choice is trivial (deciding between disliked pasta dishes, say) or serious (taking a baby off life support), people are most at peace with a negative outcome when they didn’t choose it themselves.

The Robert Ferber Award competition is held annually in honor of one of the founders and the second editor of the Journal of Consumer Research. The award is given to the best interdisciplinary dissertation article published in the latest volume of JCR.